Except they are on a train and the tracks only lead off the cliff
Haha losers. Imagine not having some form of preferential voting. Catch up idiots
go away troll no one gets any benefit from this shit
The benefit is:
a) you know what needs to change
b) you know what country to move to if it doesn’t change
c) it’s entertaining
literal genocide is happening
“it’s entertaining”
disgusting and disturbing lmao. fuck off with that nonsense
I never said genocide is entertaining. It’s really not. How did you get from a joke about preferential voting not being in America to genocide? From what I understand of American politics both are potentially genocidal, so I don’t even know how much preferential voting would help.
Where I live also doesn’t have preferential voting if it makes you feel better.
sorry, don’t mean to claim that i’ll edit my comment
Swing and a miss.
It’s not like you can’t do anything about it
Australichads stay winning
The last time Australia stood up to the USA (having bases on their land) they got couped.
Approval Voting and the proportional variety, Sequential Proportional Approval Voting, are better choices than any ranked system, but pretty much dang near anything is better than the “choose one” standard.
This is written from an “I’m right, you’re wrong” perspective. In real life, no one is running a drive off a cliff campaign, and the guy promising ice cream may not be able to deliver.
Also, fundamentally both left and right can make the argument the other side wants to run off a cliff.
In real life, no one is running a drive off a cliff campaign
I mean, one person is promising to end democracy in favor of chrisofacism. I feel like a “drive off the cliff” campaign is a pretty apt analogy.
It’s not. In a christofascism, not everybody suffers. People just assume they will be in the not suffering group. If a bus runs off a cliff, not so much.
Also, fundamentally both left and right can make the argument the other side wants to run off a cliff.
Which is a great achievement by republicans. They’re excellent at controlling the narrative and making it seam like the Biden admin is actually equally bad.
Disclaimer, I’m Dutch, so my view is an outside view;
I don’t know if it’s their achievement. It seems to me that in the USA you can choose for the conservatives who want to keep everything as it always was, including Russia as the bad guys and Israel as the ever lasting allie. Or you can chose for the conservatives who want to install a state religion and re-install segregation. The first group wants to be a global power with reach all over the world, the last group doesn’t care for the rest of the world. With both groups the rich get richer.
Yeah, it’s a baby’s understanding of politics.
Like do these people actually think we get to vote on what the bus does? No, we’re voting on the bus driver. We’ve got a screaming maniac and a doddering fool who keeps letting the maniac yank the wheel anyway, and they’re both proven liars.
Pointing out that this situation is bad is not irresponsible. The irresponsible thing is to just vote and cheer on the fool because you’re so afraid of the maniac.
if this is happening there’s a moral imperative to hijack the bus yourself
Sounds like something a cliff hater would say.
We’ll all be rich at the bottom of the canyon.
The wealth will trickle down!
You’ll all realize your potential!
you mean potential energy? the one that goes downhill?
voting is not harm reduction
What kills me are the people whose preferred form of government is not currently the most popular form of government somehow think that after a revolution that their preferred form of government will win out. They’re delusional. In most cases the government gets worse, much worse, before it gets better.
Sounds like a post by a snowflake ice cream eater
Everyone vote TRUMP before this bus drives off the cliff.
Or, more realistically:
- 3 vote to drive off the cliff
- 2 vote for ice-cream
- 4 vote to drive off the cliff at a slightly reduced speed, having been assured that they might get to look at a picture of some ice-cream, but only after democracy has been saved
Yeah, I really don’t get this attitude on Lemmy. I get not wanting to crash the bus. But voting for the guy who at best will let the other guy crash the bus in the future or at worst crash the bus tomorrow isn’t the answer.
I first thought that Lemmy was a little more of the early internet forums I remember, more anti-establishment, anarchist, left wing, but there’s way too much “vote blue no matter who” which is the exact same mentality that has killed the Republican party. Is Candidate A an immoral shit bag? Doesn’t matter; there’s a D next to their name. Probably better than the guy with the R. Better not see if anyone else is on the list.
I can afford to vote my conscience. I live in a deeply red state, so my vote doesn’t matter, something Democrats could try to fix, but they won’t. Voting 3rd party does matter though, and it’s the only way to truly affect real change and make a difference. It’s the DNC and RNC’s job to field a candidate who’s worth your vote. If they don’t do that, find someone who’s worth it.
Youre not going to get a chance to vote third party again under donnie dump, tho.
Nah, they’ll still let parties that don’t have a chance run for election. Just look at Russia, they recently had an election…
Oh yes, fair point. Like the communist party of russia. There once was many, but they ensured only the one that they could best control remains
You will never get a chance to vote for what you want became America isn’t a democracy. It’s not a democracy if a club of rich people choose who you get to vote for. That’s literally how Chinese democracy works except it’s the party instead of the oligarchs.
Cant decide if this comment is more ignorant, or defeatist…
The bus is heading for a cliff. Someone stands up and says, “this is stupid! We should change the way we make decisions so this can’t happen!” You hold that person down so they can’t stop the driver because you want to tell the driver to get ice cream after the bus drives off the cliff.
Someone has not read the faq in the OP. And either theyve missed the million and one times i call for direct action, or theyre just another bad faith actor.
The US is not a democracy, it’s an oligarchy. This is a fact. We talk about it constantly. The fact that oligarchs basically choose who can and can’t run for the two major parties, and that the two major parties control the debates, mirrors the way the Chinese Communist Party controls who can run in elections. In both cases they let the people choose between the options that are acceptable to those who are actually in charge. This is just an observation of reality.
The US was built by slave owning oligarchs who didn’t want to pay taxes for the genocide they’d been doing. They built a system od government around controlling the population. Only landed white men could vote. The facade of the system has changed over time but the system itself remains largely the same: a small group of landed white men get to control basically everything. This is just an observation of history.
The idea that any colonizer state can possibly be democratic is just absurd. Any system bult on genocide and oppression won’t magically stop being built on genocide and oppression. The system must be completely replaced.
So the question to ask is if you advocate direct action to make sure this isn’t something that can ever happened again, or if you just advocate direct action so you can go back to brunch until next time?
I would honestly recommend moving somewhere that federates with both lib and tankie servers because the tone/level of debate otherwise is pretty grim imho
No.
I will never vote for Joe Biden again and no painfully stretched metaphor is going to change that.
Awesome! Are you going to vote third party?. I’m voting for either Dr West or Claudia La Cruz. I’d recommend either of them to you stranger 👈😎
Probably psl at the national level.
Nine people= voting population of USA
Three vote to drive off cliff = MAGA plurality
Two vote for ice cream = Biden voters
Four abstain because it’s shitty ice cream = abstaining voters who presumably don’t want to die but also don’t want shitty ice cream
If that’s painfully stretched, I would like to see your definition of a straightforward metaphor…I guess “life is a rollercoaster” must take some PhD level analysis to understand.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
characterizing present day america as “ice cream” is patently absurd. suggesting that a second trump term would be driving off a cliff when we all survived the first one despite a literal pandemic is even sillier.
but the real crazy part is suggesting that there’s a gulf as wide as “ice cream vs driving off a cliff” between the two candidates.
the numbers are trash but that’s neither here nor there.
His first term didnt have a project 2017 courtesy of the federalist society.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone knew the extent of the administrative state and to what extent it would stymie the efforts of an executive it opposed.
I kinda think if we hadn’t had Covid there wouldn’t be a project 2025. Trump would have just left office and assumed the country was too sclerotic to make any kind of changes, but instead there at the end he got to see what it was really capable of. For all the “it hurt itself in its confusion” moments, operation warpspeed (a trump joint!) showed what the state was capable of.
Now everyone with half a brain is thinking how they could take advantage of that. It’s surprising democrats don’t have their own plan to create a unitary executive…
Yay, more evil!
I love all the any means necessary people, like just vote for 5 seconds and get the damned ice cream. You don’t need to sabotage the bus, just act civilly inside the bus
For all the fatalists I’ll bring beer so we can watch the world burn together after you’ve voted
Abstaining does not mean “you are okay with either option” abstaining is a vote for people not having a choice.
Idk if it is same in us, but we have what is called blank voting, which is a vote that could be that. But not voting is a fascist statement.
This is a long established problem with FPTP voting (FPTP = First Past The Post: One voter = one vote). You don’t really get to vote for your choice candidate, rather you vote against the worst of the two popular candidates by voting for the other guy.
Now there are plenty of election reform solutions, but in the US, both parties are weakened by the people having more choice, so neither party is willing to back amendments to the Constitution of the United States that would install a more public serving voting system.
This also means, according to CIA analysts who have studied nations on the brink and how they can avoid civil war, the US is very likely to see a civil war in its near future (next decade). But then we’re also likely to see elections neutered anyway, so that the Republican party controls all elected positions (and appointed ones after that). And then local genocides can get underway.
So yes, if you’re voting to make a point (other than you want the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to play out or want to delay it for a while) the point won’t be heard. In fact, the Republicans and their foreign national propaganda machine supporters are probably very glad you’re willing to withhold blue votes to make a point. It won’t make that point, but they’re glad for you for trying.
What do you say to the DNC for dropping the ball this hard?
As much as you really fucking hate to hear it: Biden won both his primaries handedly. The only way Bernie had a shot is if they clowncarred it too long like the Republican nomination that led to Trump. The DNC did not drop the ball, the American voters chose Biden.
The Democratic Party chose Biden, what was a tactical choice. The DNC uses FPTP for its primary as well (then has a list of 2000 principal party members whose votes are given additional weight. The DNC is a far right coalition party that still is guided by the interests of its monied contributors. But since the 1980s we’ve only been allowed to choose between them and the Christian Nationalist monsters.
Even after Occasio-Cortez won her primary, the DNC and DCCC changed their policy to prevent young upstarts like her from pushing aside establishment Democrat candidates. (Some of those policy changes were reversed due to pressure, but still the Democratic party is not interested in serving the public.)
How do we get a public-serving government? Dunno. Some say supporting our community mutual-aid organizations will help. (It will, actually) but in more contentious states law enforcement are looking for ways to harass and arrest mutual aid organizations, even for doing benign things like feeding the homeless. Civil war will lose the plot quickly, and will end up (typically) in a string of dictatorships, each overthrown by the next until everyone is related to casualties of war and are just plum tired of fighting, and we might get a democratic election out of it if we can fend off all the foreign influencers trying to pressure their puppets into power.
There are a few active anarcho-communist coalitions out there doing their thing, but they are continuously attacked by plutocrat financed militants and mischief-makers looking to make an example of them much like FBI’s assassination campaign on the Black Panthers. We humans may just be too easily tempted by corruption to create a functional public-serving government that doesn’t depend on a labor caste. (But do please keep working on it!)
What is your source for the CIA analysts/brink of civil war claim?
A PBS interview of retired analysts who’d spent their life studying regions of civil unrest and the conditions that lead to civil war. It was since the Biden administration began so it shouldn’t be too hard to hunt down.
As for the neutered elections, this had been part of the Republican project REDMAP, but is laid out in the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 as well.
i don’t disagree but this is also a long established problem with people not showing up to vote, so jot that down.
Taking a wild guess here, I suspect people not voting comes from a number of addressable causes. Here in the States, we are far more enamored with capitalism than Democracy, and the way we regard our civic duties (e.g. trying to get out of jury duty, mostly due to the hardship it would cause by skipping work without pay). We work our labor class so hard they are too exhausted to parent, cook or engage in health activities, much less engage in civics. It doesn’t help that this is exactly how our plutocratic masters want it.
After we address allowing people the time to think about what they want from government, and voting accordingly, then we can start looking into giving the people actual agency in their destinies, toward which election reform is only one front.
But all this is to say the United States doesn’t really try very hard to get the people to engage in civics. Rather, it would really prefer that we lie down and let ourselves be ruled by the wealthy according to their ideals and business interests. That, of course, brings us back to the same problems feudalism has: one Joffrey or Caligula or John of England / Richard II can bring to ruin all that a dozen prior generations have built up. Even Charles III is living up to the traditional standards of monarchy, and the UK has a parliament and a constitution with which to keep his shenanigans in check. (Parliament is up to its own shenanigans to turn the UK hardline fascist, but that’s another discussion.)
In elementary school government and western civilization class, we learn that we vote so that the government does what we want it to. But we quickly learn (sometimes as soon as intermediate or high-school) that our agency in selecting our government is very, very limited, and historian careers have been built on the corruption of government into an oligarchy with trivial democratic features.
Except right now, those trivial democratic features are the last line of defense between the two party state and a one-party autocracy. It’s a state of affairs that shows not only did we take a wrong turn, but we’re on a fast train to somewhere we never should have gone. Curiously, the never-Trump conservatives have been pouring billions into the proverbial railroad that lead us to Trump and the next line of Musolinni-wannabe strongman dictators. They didn’t just buy the ticket, but laid the rails.
I’m surprised an instance like this is okay with people showing up and arguing why letting a transphobic fascist take power is actually not as bad as it sounds.
